Random thoughts, musings, and tech stuff

18 Aug 2017, 12:40

Here’s a template doc that I use for my one of my roast profiles. (This is a lighter roast in terms of flavor profile, tuned to espresso. You may want to go lighter, shorter time, more acidic, for pour-over.)

Times are all relative, I have a timer that I restart at the beginning of each phase of the roast, as outlined in the doc. E.g., if I overshoot one phase, the overall roast time is lengthened. Temperatures are from my thermocouples that I’ve adjusted based on understanding the typical FC temp to be 392ºF. I use artisan in addition to this for tracking, but these notes tend to be much more useful for me to dial in my roasts. If you’re going to make adjustments to timing, I would suggest changing one phase by no more than 30s, and comparing. (+/- 10s in any given phase is a change that you may be able to taste.)

08 May 2016, 07:36

Sixteen months ago, my daughter was born. After a difficult first week, the first month was great, challenging, but overall things were really good. Then the depression crept back in.

I’ve been dealing with depression for almost as long as I can remember. It comes in waves for me, where sometimes I’ll be generally feeling good, or ok for weeks, then seemingly out of nowhere, the depression knocks me down, and would stick around for one or a few weeks. Life was this cycle of feeling good for a while, getting depressed for a while, then fighting my way out of it and starting the cycle over.

I was generally happy when I would get home from work, but I’d spend the days being miserable, and wanting to quit my job. I don’t have a bad job, and in a lot of ways, it’s a really great job, but this was what was really bothering me at the time.

After Lydia was born, I decided that being depressed was a real hinderance to my ability to be the sort of father that I wanted to be. I wanted to be able to set a good example, and not act irrationally or impulsively because I couldn’t think of an alternative. I wanted to be able to pass on some tools for dealing with life better. So, after years of dealing with this, I made an appointment with a therapist.

I ended up only going to two sessions, because that’s all that I felt like I needed. Those two sessions were so useful, and illuminating, that it has taken me a little over a year to get to a point where I might need to go back for a refresher. The therapist that I met with introduced me to a version of therapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT). CBT’s model is that our thoughts are what cause our feelings, and if we change the way that we think about things, then we can change the way that we feel. It can be broken down into a few parts: cognitions, goals, and behaviors. (As a note, there’s a great book called “Feeling Good” that goes through all the basics of CBT.)

One of the really basic CBT tools is a chart that helps you to identify specifically the thoughts that are triggering your negative emotions, and then asks you to come up with alternate ways to think about the triggering event or that idea that might be more balanced. This requires paying close attention to how you’re feeling, and working backwards from there, which is tricky initially, but you get the hang of it.

Using this technique, I was able to begin to see what was bothering me so much, and it turned out that if I forced myself to restate what was happening, in a way that might be more balanced and not as distorted, I felt better about the situation. After going through this exercise a number of times, I started to internalize the process and could run through this exercise in my head, faster and faster as things happened. I also was becoming more conscious of how I felt, and why I felt that way.

It has also highlighted to me a basic thought pattern that I had of taking a negative default view of things, which I then was able to shift to start take a more positive view. I’ve also started figuring out different strategies for handling difficult situations better, a big part of which is simply setting expectations differently, revising expectations as needed, and changing my approach.

Things aren’t perfect, and probably will never be, but overall, I have been happier in the last year than any other time that I can remember. That’s mostly a result of focusing on the best parts of my life, instead of the few not so great details. At this point, I certainly feel like I have more to give Lydia that will hopefully help her to avoid the trap of depression that I fell into. As a bonus, I can enjoy my time with my family to a much greater extent than before.

07 Mar 2016, 08:37

Not too long ago, Let’s Encrypt launched a free CA to enable website owners to easily generate their own signed certificates from the command line on their server. It integrates with popular web servers like Apache and NGINX to make the validation step easier. However, the certificates are only valid for 3 months, as opposed to the 1 year that is more typical. They’ll send an email when your certificate is close to expiring, but that’s not always idea. The good news is that since this is a command line tool, it can be easily written into a cron job to run periodically.

The current release, 0.4.2, seems to work reasonably well for scripted renewals. There are a couple notes for issues that I ran into, at least with this version. First, here’s the general command that I use for renewals:

That’s great when you have a simple site, with sub-domains that all point to one set of content, and one vhost entry (per port). If you have a couple of different subdomains that relate to different sets of content, something like this:

03 Mar 2016, 09:08

This morning, I was trying to to swap out the pink filament with new white filament that I picked up on Amazon. The filament was completely stuck, I couldn’t unload or load or do much of anything with it. I found great GitHub repo for MOD-t utilities, and tried running the clean nozzle tool. (There’s a config file for Slic3r, a popular modeling tool for 3D printing. There are some calibration files, old firmware, and a clean nozzle utility.) That bought me a bit of pink filament dripping out of the nozzle. However, after some additional searching, I found this Google Group for the MOD-t, and on it, there was a really helpful post entitled “Clearing Filament Jam Without Opening MOD-t”. Basically, it said that the jam may be living above the nozzle, and if that’s the case, then what you can do is remove the hot end (nozzle), heat up the nut (with a soldering iron or something), and pull the jammed filament out.

I used tweezers to hold the filament inside the nut, and needle nose pliers to hold the tweezers. Then I heated up both the tweezers and the nut, and was able to pull the jammed bit of filament out. After that, I replaced the hot end, loaded the new filament, and was back in business.

Future self - if this happens again, try the above solution!

01 Mar 2016, 08:30

Back in the beginning of November, I received a giant box on my doorstep. It was a 3D printer that I had backed on Indiegogo a year and a half earlier. The printer is a New Matter MOD-t. They were a bit late shipping, but that was not exactly unexpected, generally, I’m happy when crowdfunded projects ship at all. Either way, it was here, arriving just in time for me to be super busy with other things. We were on our way out to do something, so all I had time to do was pull it out of the box, and stick it on a shelf.

This past weekend, I finally got around to getting the thing actually set up, and running. While the setup was rocky, and the desktop app poor, the overall experience is actually better than expected. I’m very excited to see where New Matter takes this product.

The setup was not easy, the software tools that they provide for Mac don’t work well. I was able to get the firmware updated on the machine, but spent about two hours trying to get it to connect to WiFi. There was a bug in their installer and desktop app that shows an error and a ‘disconnected’ status, even when the WiFi is connected properly. Took me a while to realize that it had actually been connected. One of the problems with this is that it means that it’s impossible to complete the setup installation, including calibrating the thing and loading the filament. You can install the desktop app without completing the setup, so I did that.

After getting the desktop app installed, I tried getting on WiFi again (still didn’t realize that I was connected), and ran into the same bug described above. I decided to skip that, and try to get the test print going. Looking in the desktop app, they have a button called ‘Load Filament’, I tried that, and it asked me if I wanted to unload or load the filament. I needed to load filament, and it then gave instructions for first unloading filament, and then a button to press for loading filament. I pressed the button and nothing happened. It took me quite some time to figure out that you needed to restart the printer while on that screen in the app before that button would become active. (Restarting the printer is part of the unload filament process.) Figuring that bit out, I was able to get the filament loaded and the test print going.

This is about the time that I figured out that the printer was really connected, and showing up in the New Matter web app. Excellent! I loaded up some STL files from Thingiverse into my New Matter library, and sent them to the printer from the web. I was able to disconnect the printer from my MacBook, and let it run on its own. From here, I was able to basically get what I needed done with little to no issue.

For me, this is where the MOD-t really shines, and I think that New Matter has done a brilliant job. There’s no figuring out printer settings, or doing a deep dive into deeply understanding how FDM 3D printers work, you just go to the website, and hit ‘print’, then press a button on the printer. Simple. The problems that I experienced were all, 100%, on the desktop app side, which are easily fixable with updates.

There were two little hiccups. First, the top part of the watch stand that I was printing kept failing. I needed to edit the STL file to fix it, but it wasn’t really New Matter’s fault. The file was set up to print with only a single edge on the print bed. I grabbed the Meshmixer app, rotated the part, re-uploaded, and it printed just fine. The other issue was that the New Matter web app doesn’t seem to handle printing multiple parts too well (or at all). You can add multiple parts to a thing in your library, but it will only print one of them, without giving you a way to select which one. The workaround is just to upload each part separately, and that’s not really an issue.

All in all, I’m very excited about doing more with this thing. I’ve already started printing a case for the PiGrrl 2 project that I’m working on, just waiting for some white filament to arrive for printing certain parts. The watch stand that I printed is great, and I saved myself $15 which is what they go for on Amazon. If you’re in the market for a 3D printer, and want something simple and relatively inexpensive, this is a good choice.

09 Feb 2016, 08:06

I’ve been roasting coffee for 7 or 8 years. In that time, I’ve learned how to roast a great batch of beans that will make excellent, and easy to drink espresso. This tends to live somewhere between City+ and Full City+, usually right at Full City. Now, this is great, and I love the coffee that I roast, but I have realized that I haven’t really nailed the lighter roasts yet, specifically, roasting an excellent batch to City, where the bean is fully developed and has a rounded flavor.

The other thing that’s going on right now, is that I’m waiting for a new roaster setup, which is currently being built. The new setup is a BBQ top 5lb roaster from Coffee Roasters Club. The new roaster is going to be entirely manual, where I’ll completely control both the heat and time. Additionally, controlling the heat exactly is going to be tricky, since it’ll be done on the grill.

With the new setup, I needed some new tools. First, I knew that I would need some way to grab temperature data, and preferably to log it. There’s an app that a friend told me about called “Roastmaster”, which helps you manage just about everything involved with coffee roasting, and has an option to do data logging. I checked out which data loggers were supported, and found that the BlueTherm Duo looked like what I wanted. (I was looking for something bluetooth, with two probes, that could handle the heat.)

My BlueTherm came in the other day, and last night was time to roast some coffee.

Getting the BlueTherm set up was as easy as turning it on and plugging one of the thermocouples in. I opened the Settings on my iPad, and paired it with Bluetooth quickly enough. Getting it connected in the Roastmaster app was a little unintuitive, but it worked. Luckily, Roastmaster has excellent documentation, which I would suggest having a look at.

Now it was time to place the thermocouple. If you see the the two thermocouple leads in the BlueTherm photo you’ll notice that one has an alligator clip, and the other is a probe that you’d stick into something like a steak. The alligator clip one is the more useful one here. I clipped the clip onto the downward facing vertical part of the chaff tray, next to the drum. I maybe could’ve gotten it underneath the drum, I’ll look up ideal placement next time around. The lead wire is fairly thick, but I was able to let it out in the upper right corner of the roaster door, which allowed me to still close the door. All good.

I plugged things in, and got a roast ready to go, both with my roaster, and in the Roastmaster app. After the thermocouple was all set, and everything ready to go, I fired things up, and let it run.

Getting good readings, and things are logging correctly. Yay!

In the app, there are buttons to record the first and second cracks. The app itself is fairly complicated, and there’s definitely a learning curve involved. That said, it’s an extremely useful tool, and I think that it will be indispensable to me going forward.

Something that I thought was interesting while I was roasting was that I could see how much heat was lost whenever I opened up the door to check on the progress. It’s funny, but it had never really occurred to me before that opening the door for a couple of seconds would have that much of an impact on the roast, but when I was logging the temperature data, it was clear that it dropped significantly, and took a bit of time to climb back up.

Another interesting finding was that opening the door during the Behmor’s cooling cycle does not cool it down faster than leaving the door closed (though it does make more of a mess). This seems counterintuitive, but I think that it was designed to get a lot of airflow, assuming the door was closed. It’s similar to a PC case that has been designed to maximize airflow through the components, opening up the case door does not make it cooler, it just screws up the airflow.

For me, working with the Behmor is still pretty tricky, but I would really like to learn how to improve on that machine before my new equipment comes next month. Going to a fully manual setup is a little daunting, and I’d like to use this last month to really push the Behmor and see what I can get out of it.

27 Jan 2016, 09:27

I drink some of the best coffee in the Bay Area, every day, for free. Here’s how I do it.

Step 1

This may sound like cheating, but the easiest way to drink amazing coffee all the time is to learn to make amazing coffee yourself. I’ve spent years working on this skill, learning a bunch of different methods of brewing and extracting coffee, learning what works and what doesn’t. For me, that’s more than just knowing how to make a good pot of coffee.

I worked at a couple of coffee shops when I was in high school and college. I’ve had an espresso machine at home for around 14 years now, and this past year is when I finally started getting the extractions that I wanted consistently. It doesn’t need to take 15 years to do, having good equipment helps a lot, and that was somewhat of a barrier for me until now. Even with a great espresso machine and knowing how to pull an excellent espresso, I’m still learning how to really nail the latte. I’ve been making progress:

Over the years, I’ve also learned pour-over, cold brew, siphon, and french press. I’ve done cowboy coffee on a few occasions. All this to say, that at home, I’m capable of making coffee that rivals most coffee shops around. No, I’m not better than Blue Bottle, or Chromatic, but most of the time, I don’t have a reason to buy coffee out.

Step 2

Get some good equipment. The first thing is a burr grinder. You’ll want to grind your coffee just before you brew it. It starts oxidizing very quickly once ground, as that happens the flavor disappears.

I would also recommend a cheap kitchen scale, so that you can use a consistent amount of coffee, to make your coffee more consistent. A good rule of thumb is 7g of coffee per serving (6oz for drip, 4oz for french press).

If you’re into drip coffee, I’d suggest finding a drip machine that uses a stainless steel insulated carafe, instead of a glass carafe with a heating element. I would also try to find one that heats the water to between 190-200ºF, which is a typical suggested extraction temperature.

For espresso, you’ll probably want to start with a less expensive machine like a Gaggia and work your way up. I love my Expobar, it has delivered results that I have not seen on the lower end machines that I’ve used. Espresso is a bit of an expensive hobby.

Step 3

Roast coffee at home. This is where you start saving money. Roasting at home means that you get the freshest possible beans, for cheaper than the grocery store brand (probably). Can you buy 1lb of beans that were roasted yesterday for $6.50? If you can, then maybe you don’t need a roaster.

Roasting is a skill itself, and will take some time to get the hang of, but it’s totally worth it. If you are into espresso, the difference in flavor will be obvious, and you’ll start to wonder why you should pay for espresso out. You’ll be drinking the freshest coffee possible, and freshness is what brings you flavor.

Roasting is a bit of a hassle, but once you get into it, it’s really not that bad. I know the timing of my machine for the batches that I roast, so I know the 3-4 minute window where I need to be watching my machine, and paying close attention. (Warning, beans can catch fire while roasting, you’re going to need to know what to look out for in that case - primarily fire in your roaster.)

Step 4

Sell half of your roasted beans for twice what you bought them for raw. E.g., buy 1lb of raw beans for $6.50, roast it, sell half of that for $6.50. I tend to roast about 340g of raw beans, which comes out to around 290g roasted, and then sell 145g of that for $5. I tend to sell around 3 batches of the 145g beans per week, and drink about the same amount at home. Quick note here, I make sure to buy larger quantities of beans (12-16lbs) using Sweet Maria’s fixed shipping option to keep shipping costs low.

What’s great is that this is a good deal for your friend who’s buying it too. It’s cheaper for your friend than buying a higher end brand that is fresh. I sell mine by the gram, so 290g (~10oz) is $10, or $11.75 for 12oz. According to Instacart, buying coffee from Whole Foods would be expensive: Philz is $14.50 for 12oz, Blue Bottle is $12-14 for 8oz, Stumptown is $17 for 12oz, same as Ritual, SightGlass is $16 for 12oz, FourBarrel is $18 for 12oz.

Conclusion

Has it all been worth it? For me it has been. Since I started this whole process years ago, it’s difficult to calculate the savings. However, let me give it a try. Let’s say that 5 times a week, you go out for coffee, either for espresso, or a latte, or just a regular coffee. I’m going to assume that each trip is going to average $3.50. That’s $17.50 per week, or $910 per year. Let’s add to that making coffee at home, with some reasonable quality grocery store beans at $12/lb, where you go through 0.5lbs per week, that’s another $312 per year brewing coffee at home, and adds up to a total of $1,222 annually.

Cutting the investment above down to the bare essentials, you could pick up a 1lb roaster for $370 (Behmor 1600 Plus), a nice grinder for $130 (Baratza Encore), a Gaggia Classic for $300, and a pour-over v60 for $20. That’s an initial one-time investment of $820. If you get up and running roasting and selling your beans quickly, you could save money the first year, and even afford to get a nice espresso machine like mine by the second year, and still come out ahead.

Even if you ended up not selling beans, you’d likely use around 1lbs per week (making a bit more at home, and not going out), so you would spend around $338 annually.

It’s a bit of work roasting so frequently, but I really enjoy my time with my coffee.

26 Jan 2016, 11:42

I recently wrote about my New Year’s resolution of not quitting things, and it has taken me a while to figure out what to start. I could get into this circular logic loop and try to explain why I haven’t picked something yet, but that seems like a waste of pixels. Whatever, here goes.

For the next 30 days, I’m going to be eating healthier. I’m going to try this for one month, evaluate, and iterate. From today until Feb 26, each day, I am going to do the following:

Track my eating on MyFitnessPal (MFP)

Try to hit the following general numbers:

Calories - 1800

Carbs - 180

Fat - 60

Protein - 135

Cholesterol - 300

Sugar - 70

For any day where I’m within 10% of every number, I will count that day as a success

I will use a habit tracking app to track successful days

Success of this goal will be 23 successful days of the 30

If you’d like to connect on MFP, my username there is emil10001.

Now for some questions to help me set exepctations. Doing something like this actually becomes harder when you write publicly about it, because you get feedback that your brain interprets the same way as it does if you’d actually accomplished the thing.

Why don’t I do this already, what are the barriers? Logging food in MFP every day is time consuming and cumbersome. I’m going ot try to cut down on how much effort it takes to do this, by creating recipes and standard meals that I can reuse and quickly enter. I also occasionally enjoy baking and eating sweets. I’m not saying that I’m going to cut this out completely, but I’ll at least be more consious of its impact, by logging those foods and cutting back as needed.

Alcohol is another one that could do with another round of cuts. I typically drink Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, which is by far my favorite beer, but also around 300 calories per bottle. While I have significantly cut down my alcohol intake since the summer, I could afford to cut it further, even without cutting it out completely. Again, every time I drink it, I’m going to log it, and cut back as needed.

Why do I feel the need to do this now? What is the goal? What’s my motivation? This is something that I’ve been doing something off and on for years. It’s not new. My goals are basically two-fold, first to lose some excess weight, and second to feel better overall and be healthier. I feel like this is one of those little things that can really have a big impact on my daily mood, and how I feel about myself.

I have noticed in the past, that eating well tends to improve my mood, and how I feel about myself. Successfully doing this helps to motivate me to do other things that I want to do. I think that it is one of the most basic, simple things that I can do that will have a large impact.

It is going to be difficult to cut down on the junk, especially cutting down enough to get within 10% of my daily goals. But, I think that if I can allow myself to fail a little, and keep going, then I think that I will be able to complete this goal.

18 Jan 2016, 09:56

I am starting this post on my phone. I realized that one of the roadblocks that I have is that the workflow for creating new blog posts from my phone was nonexistent. I had a git client, and a Markdown editor, but Hugo uses special headers, and I also needed to be able to publish on my server.

Here’s what I did:

Built an Android app to generate the header, and add it to my clipboard. Source

Add a script to my server for easy publishing.

Set up JuiceSSH, so that I can log into my server from my phone.

New header

With those couple things, I can now do the end-to-end process of creating and publishing blog posts from my phone. Here’s how that goes:

In git client, pull from remote

Create new file in repo

Open file in JotterPad

Run my HugoNew app

Paste header into new post file

Save file, and push to get repo

Log into my server and run publish script

It still needs work (no image support yet), since it is a lot of steps, but it is a start.

08 Jan 2016, 10:15

Ever since New Year’s day, I’ve been thinking about what this year’s resolution should be. I have reflected a bit on the last year, and overall, I’m very happy with my 2015. My biggest accomplishment, was entering fatherhood, and not feeling like I have been faking it. Second to that, was that I finally am starting to feel like I have some effective tools to combat depression. (But, that’s a whole other topic.) The two of those things together really made 2015 a great year for me.

However, for 2016, I’d like to approach the year with a little more focus, and clarity, with a small goal for something that I’d like to make a habit of. I figure that if I can do something small as a habit for a whole year, it can snowball something small into something much larger.

Last night, I was watching one of Casey Neistat’s latest vlogs, called “Losers and Closers”. It got me thinking a lot about quitting, or rather, about not quitting. Neistat takes the view that quitting is never OK, and you should always try to finish everything. Here’s the video:

I don’t think that I’m going to be that strict with myself, however, what it got me thinking about was a lot of little projects that I’ve started that could have been more interesting than they were, if I’d bothered to finish them. Or, if I had stuck with some really good habits that I had tried to keep, that the results would have been really great.

The problem that I have with projects is that I’ve constantly got new ideas, and after I’m about half-way into building one thing, lots of times, I drop it and move on to another thing. For example, a couple of years ago I started building this website about things that I built on a weekly basis. I put a couple of weeks into it, but never finished it, and haven’t updated the project list in forever. Last summer, I built an Android app that I can use for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but never cleaned it up for release. More recently, I started writing about building public APIs on the phone with Android, and while I haven’t given up on that yet, I also haven’t added to that collection in over a month. This isn’t true of everything that I start,

As far as habits, it’s probably the same story as everyone else. Here’s another Casey Neistat’s videos that talks about that:

2016 Resolution

Getting to the point, for 2016, I’m not going to quit either projects or habits. What this means for habits is that I’m going to have to be very careful about what I try to start, because I’ll be committing to doing it for a whole year. For projects, it means that I can’t drop off whatever I’m currently working on for something new and exciting. Or, that I’ll have to interleave projects to keep up progress on everything. While I do have a couple of projects ongoing right now, as soon as I finish them, my plan is to try to only do one at a time.

I am also going to do something very different this year to try to work towards this goal, which is to publicly post at the start of a project, that I’m starting something. I hate talking about things until they’re done, but I think that this is going to be important.

Finally, I know that I’m going to fail at this from time to time. That’s OK. I am not looking for perfection, I am looking for improvement.